for people who care about the West

Where do we go from here? Taking the West
Forward

In his 1992 book
Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of
the West, Charles Wilkinson writes that in the modern
era, Westerners need to "move beyond settlement and to achieve
resource sustainability, economic stability, and social justice in
a great land."

That call for change saw some results in
the 1990s, but during the last four years, the movement to reform
the West has slowed. The Bush administration has opened the
region’s resources to development, massively increasing oil
and gas drilling on both public and private land. At the same time,
it has dramatically reduced public involvement in decision making.
The federal government has repeatedly disregarded or manipulated
its own scientists’ work, sometimes to devastating effect, as
during the repeated die-offs of salmon and endangered steelhead in
the Klamath Basin. It has stripped roadless forestlands and
citizen-proposed wilderness areas of federal protection. The list
goes on.

For many Westerners, the presidential election
offered hope for a political transformation, and a chance to work
toward a more progressive future for the region. That
transformation did not happen.

But regardless of the
national political situation during the next four years, we need to
keep moving forward. We have been running the West at full throttle
for a long time, and the dashboard is aglow with warning lights:
water shortages, forests aflame, water contamination from coalbed
methane drilling, and the conversion of wildlife habitat into
housing at breakneck speed. If we refuse to acknowledge the
problems, disaster may not be far off.

The beginning of a
presidential term presents Westerners with an opportunity to
identify the problems that most threaten the future of our region,
and to begin talking about how we might take them on. In this
edition of High Country News, we focus on 10
issues in desperate need of action. These are challenges that we
believe are nonpartisan, and that will remain significant far
beyond the next four years. They can — and should —
unite the West.

If there is a common theme, it is that
much of the vision and leadership must come from the ground level.
If we can show signs of progress on the ground, the Bush
administration — which touts itself as a champion of local
control — will have no choice but to acknowledge and
encourage these initiatives.

As history has repeatedly
shown, reform will come only incrementally. But the challenges
described here give cause for hope: In seeking solutions, we may
yet be able to forge a collective commitment to finding a way of
living in the West that works.

—THE EDITORS OF HIGH COUNTRY NEWS

ENERGY

States lead the charge for
renewables

In a speech 25 years
ago, President Jimmy Carter asked, "Why have we not been able to
get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?"

In the mire of the 1979 energy crisis, Carter called on
Americans to conserve energy. He also set a goal that by 2000, 20
percent of the electricity generated in the United States would be
from the sun.

But in the years that followed, the country
made little progress toward that goal, and when 2000 arrived, the
United States was far from clean and green. Instead, two oil
company executives rose to power: President George W. Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney. They immediately set out to increase oil and
natural gas production. The Bush administration has called to open
Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, to
"expedite" energy projects on the West’s public lands, and to
"streamline" environmental laws across the nation. This November,
when Americans signed up Bush and Cheney for four more years
— and boosted the Republican majority in Congress —
they chose production over conservation.

That leaves the
states to explore renewable energy options and energy efficiency on
their own. Colorado just became the nation’s 18th state to
set its own renewable energy standards; utilities must generate 10
percent of the state’s energy from renewable sources by 2015.
And Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, D, has called for her state to
become the "next Persian Gulf of solar energy." California has an
ambitious 20 percent by 2017 goal, and state legislatures in
Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona have all set renewable goals as
well.

The Western Governors’ Association recently
rolled out a program to track the use of renewable energy in the
Western states. The association intends to turn the program into a
renewables-credit system, allowing companies to meet state
renewable-energy standards by purchasing credits from businesses in
other states.

Even with these efforts toward regional
cooperation, the states still need help from Congress. When a tax
credit for wind energy projects expired at the end of 2003, it took
Congress almost a year to reauthorize it, halting billions of
dollars' worth of new projects in 2004. Restoring the 1.8 cent per
kilowatt hour credit is a start — but it will expire again at
the end of 2005, and it’s anybody’s guess what the more
conservative incoming Congress will do next year. Although
advocates for clean energy aren’t as easy to find as those
for the fossil fuel industry, there are three names that stand out
among congressional leaders: Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Sen. John
McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Still,
it’s going to take more than a half-hearted commitment to
creating a clean energy economy. "Imagine if some of this stuff had
started in 1979 (with Carter)," says Richard Grossman, who led the
fight against nuclear energy in the 1970s and today heads the
nonprofit Project on Corporations, Law and Democracy. "It could
have been done. It’s not a technological problem; it’s
a problem of political will."

GLOBAL
WARMING

Westerners can speak truth to
power

You didn’t need to
see this summer’s blockbuster, The Day After
Tomorrow, to grasp the impacts of global warming on the
West. The region got a live-action sneak preview back in the summer
of 2002, when drought and high temperatures fed record-setting
wildfires.

Was this really global warming at work? Most
scientists, with their customary caution, still aren’t ready
to give a definite answer to that question. But they will say that
in the future, the West is likely to look a lot like the summer of
2002. With continued global warming, current research suggests, the
Interior West can expect deeper and more widespread drought, hotter
temperatures, less snow — and, of course, more and bigger
wildfires (HCN, 9/27/04: In a warming West, expect more fire).

Yet the Bush administration isn’t satisfied with
the international scientific near-consensus that humans are
changing the climate. The president and administration officials
emphasize the uncertainties about the causes and effects of global
warming, and oppose mandatory curbs on greenhouse gas production.

The West, however, isn’t waiting for Washington.
Nonprofit groups such as the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization
and Cities for Climate Protection are encouraging local governments
and businesses to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. More than
three dozen Western cities, including "red state" metropolises such
as Salt Lake City and Tucson, have already cut their energy use
— and consequent greenhouse gas production — as part of
the international Cities for Climate Protection program.

On the "blue" Coast, California, Washington and Oregon have all
taken steps to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, and in late 2003,
the three governors pledged to cooperate on new climate-protection
policies. The California Legislature has approved standards
expected to reduce heat-trapping automobile emissions by about 30
percent by 2016. Earlier this year, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, D,
created a task force of academics, environmentalists,
businesspeople and others to identify ways for the state to cut its
greenhouse-gas production; among its draft recommendations is the
adoption of the California tailpipe standards.

But cities
and states can’t do it alone. To effectively slow — and
eventually reverse — the impacts of global warming, federal
action is needed. Arizona Sen. John McCain, R, has championed
legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and his dogged
advocacy has put a valuable bipartisan face on the issue. But the
McCain-Lieberman bill, which was defeated 43-55 in a Senate vote
last year, will face an even tougher crowd in the new Congress.

What is certain is that in the continuing push for
national action on global warming, Westerners can play an important
role. Because we’ve had a glimpse of the future under global
warming, we now have a dramatic — and instructive —
story to tell. Pressure from state governments and grassroots
initiatives, combined with the ever-louder international call for
action on greenhouse gas emissions, will eventually become
impossible for the White House to ignore. Westerners can help make
that happen sooner, not later.

WATER

It's time to get flexible

It usually takes a crisis to spur change in the world of
Western water. As luck would have it, a major drought in the
Colorado River Basin has arrived at the perfect time.

After a century’s worth of tremendous public investment in
the construction of Western waterworks, we have piled up plenty of
water behind dams. Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which together hold
four years’ worth of the Colorado River’s flow, have
often been depicted as a sort of regional insurance policy. Now,
after five full years of drought, they are half-empty, most of the
water having gone not to cities or to the environment, but to grow
crops such as iceberg lettuce in California’s Imperial
Valley.

It is time to remove the bar from the door so
that water can begin moving to where it’s most needed —
to meet the evolving needs of the West’s urban areas as well
as those of the region’s streams and rivers. It is possible
to do so equitably through the use of water transfers, which allow
those in need of water to lease or otherwise "borrow" it from
willing water rights holders, many of whom claimed their rights
over a century ago.

Transfers are not a radical concept.
They’ve long been used in Colorado and, more recently, in
California, where they have put water into the state’s
Environmental Water Account. That account is, in part, a creation
of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which has moved forward in
fits and starts since the 1980s to make water transfers possible.
The Bush administration has vowed to continue this progress in its
Water 2025 initiative, which was unveiled a year and a half ago.
But Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton has also been painfully
insistent on the principle that water is a states’ issue.

States and cities have been sorting things out for
themselves: Most recently, Las Vegas and the Metropolitan Water
District of California inked an agreement to trade Colorado River
credits to meet short-term needs. The federal government gave its
blessing to the deal, but it needs to take a more active role in
facilitating interstate transfers, and in allowing transfers of
water from farmers to urban areas and streams where the need is
acute.

Encouraging water transfers does not mean that the
West’s urbanites will rise to greatness with their boot on
farming’s throat. In one of the most promising tactics,
pioneered in California in the 1980s, cities invest in making farms
more efficient by lining canals with concrete to prevent seepage,
or by helping farmers convert from flood irrigation to more
efficient watering methods. In exchange, the cities get the
conserved water.

Transfers will provide the sort of
adaptability that’s needed to thread the needle of the
current drought. They will not, however, eliminate the need for a
crucial debate: Will we simply trade one kind of water-intensive
growth in the desert for another, or will we use this crisis to
begin putting the brakes on development, and diversify our
strategies for living in this dry land?

THE
NUCLEAR WEST

States need to take a stand on
weapons, workers and waste

The
Cold War is over, and aboveground nuclear testing ended in 1992,
but a new nuclear age is dawning in the West. As the Bush
administration requests billions of dollars from Congress for
nuclear weapons maintenance, manufacturing and research, Western
states are vying to score the next big contract — either to
resume production of "pits" to replace aging triggers in the
nation’s existing nuclear stockpile, or to develop nuclear
"bunker-buster" weapons (HCN, 9/1/03: Courting the bomb).

But communities should ask themselves if the prospect of new jobs
is worth the fallout of nuclear proliferation. That question is
particularly important as 140,000 American soldiers slog through a
war in Iraq that was marketed by the Bush administration as a
search for "weapons of mass destruction."

We might also
look a little closer to home to see how Western weapons workers and
"downwinders" have fared over the last 60 years. Today, four years
after Congress passed a bill to compensate Cold War-era weapons
workers who became sick as a result of their work, 98 percent of
those dying workers are still waiting for their claims to be
processed. Meanwhile, citizens who lived downwind from the last
generation of nuclear tests sit through one court case after
another, as the federal government denies responsibility for the
thousands of cancer cases that victims claim have resulted from
fallout. And this fall, Congress has approved a bill allowing the
Energy Department to "reclassify" high-level radioactive waste at
weapons sites as "waste incidental to reprocessing" — thereby
allowing the federal government to simply leave the waste where it
is.

The time has come for states to oppose a reckless
federal policy of proliferation, by refusing to take part in
building new weapons — and refusing to be a dumping ground
for a new generation of nuclear waste. Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah,
introduced a bill last year that would require Congress, rather
than the president, to authorize resumption of nuclear testing at
the Nevada Test Site. But he supports nuclear weapons production
and voted to decrease the amount of time required for the site to
be "test-ready." Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., will soon become the new
Senate minority leader. Reid opposes storage of the nation’s
nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain and supports aid for weapons
workers and communities affected by fallout; now may be the time
for him to tackle the problem at its production-and-testing root.

In the absence of federal leadership, grassroots groups
will have to keep the nonproliferation flame burning. Groups such
as the New Mexico-based Nuclear Watch and the Los Alamos Study
Group, the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah and the Natural
Resources Defense Council persist in holding the federal government
accountable for its actions. They also have the foresight and
compassion to try to prevent new bombs from being built in the
first place.

ENDANGERED SPECIES

Reform the act to save it

The 1973 Endangered Species Act is a crucial tool for
protecting the West’s environment. But the ESA is far from
perfect.

For years, Congress has refused to provide the
agencies in charge of endangered species protection with enough
money to determine which species to protect, much less to actually
protect them. Those agencies — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Fisheries — spend much of their inadequate budgets defending
themselves from lawsuits by environmentalists, who charge them with
neglecting their ESA responsibilities.

The key to
reviving the ESA is money. There needs to be a steady funding
source to provide more incentives for landowners to protect and
create endangered species habitat. Increased, regular funding would
help eliminate the backlog of species still waiting for
consideration, and bolster recovery plans for those already listed.
It would also help support the reintroduction of species into
habitat from which they have disappeared.

But some
changes may be merited, including tweaking one aspect of the law
that many see as unfair: It applies not only to federal land, but
also to private landowners. And over the years, protecting
endangered species and habitat has cost landowners many millions of
dollars by limiting development and reducing farm and ranch
production.

Some environmentalists acknowledge that if
society wants to protect species and habitat on private land, the
taxpayers should do more to pay for it. There have been some
attempts to reform the law. Changes made during the Clinton
administration, for example, allow landowners some flexibility if
they participate in "habitat conservation plans" and obtain permits
for impacts on endangered species. But so far, Congress has failed
to provide significant cash to landowners.

Now, Sen. Mike
Crapo, R-Idaho, and Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., who chair key
congressional committees, are trying to address property-rights
concerns through a large-scale rewriting of the law. Their proposal
would weaken the requirement for protecting "critical habitat" and
require more "peer review" by scientists outside the agencies,
which means scientists funded by industry. As one agency biologist
says, "You can’t beat industry science," because industry can
afford to hire an overwhelming number of scientists who know where
their money comes from.

Environmentalists have a much
better chance of heading off such attacks if they support the
reforms needed to make the law less of a target for property-rights
advocates. Any reform of the Endangered Species Act will involve
trade-offs — but those may be necessary to keep the law
alive.

PRIVATE LANDS

The
‘rest of the West’ is more important than
ever

The West is renowned for its
public lands, but roughly half the region is privately owned. The
private lands, located primarily in the valley bottoms, are not
only the most biologically rich in the West; they are also the most
endangered. Ranchlands and farmlands are being converted to housing
tracts and strip malls at an astonishing rate (HCN, 3/29/04: Who
will take over the ranch?).

Nonetheless, it is private
lands that present some of the greatest conservation opportunities
for the next four years and beyond. Over the past decade, a land
trust movement has sprung to life to keep the most valuable lands
intact. The more than 265 land trusts in the West have conserved
over 2.5 million acres through conservation easements and outright
purchase.

But that is just a drop in the bucket: The West
has 100 million acres of private ranchlands alone. As Alan Front,
senior vice president of the Trust for Public Land, says, "There is
an ocean of need and a trickle of cash."

Still,
Westerners continue to show that they are willing to tax themselves
to protect private lands from the bulldozer blade. In this
election, they approved ballot measures amounting to $431.5 million
for land and conservation easements, according to the Trust for
Public Land.

These local efforts can be leveraged into
even more protection, with help from the state and federal
governments. But Western states have generally allocated few
dollars to private-lands conservation, and the Bush administration
and Congress have been stingy with funding for the past four years.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is the
granddaddy of funds for conservation purchases, is supposed to be
filled each year with federal royalties from offshore oil and gas
development. But the fund has steadily decreased, from a high of
$450 million in 2001 to just $175 million in 2004.

Still,
other sources of money have grown under the Bush administration.
The Forest Legacy Program, the Farm and Ranchland Protection
Program, and funding for Habitat Conservation Plans, which protect
endangered species, now each provide approximately $100 million a
year to purchase private lands or conservation easements.

But the biggest bang for private-land conservation may come through
another Bush administration priority — tax reform.
Conservationists, allied with ranchers, farmers and
sportsmen’s groups, will continue pushing for reforms in the
federal tax code that increase the incentives for landowners to
voluntarily conserve wildlife habitat, says Rand Wentworth,
director of the Land Trust Alliance.

The reforms, which
Wentworth says could leverage $18 billion worth of conservation
easement donations over the next decade, didn’t make it into
law this year, but will be reintroduced next year.

Standing at the gate is Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, R, chairman of
the Finance Committee. Last year, following a Washington Post
exposé, Grassley held a series of hearings looking into the
legality and propriety of land-acquisition practices at The Nature
Conservancy and other land trusts. The high-profile attention has
forced internal reforms at The Nature Conservancy and set up a quid
pro quo for any future tax-reform legislation: Grassley will not
include any new conservation incentives without other reform
measures, including tighter land-appraisal standards to ensure that
conservation easements won’t be abused for personal profit.

HEALTHY FORESTS

Learn to
love the cut

There’s been a
lot of ink spilled about the evils of the 2003 Healthy Forests
Restoration Act. The act’s backers, including Western
congressmen and President Bush, sold it as a way to protect
communities from wildfire, but critics say it strips the forests of
protection and, in some cases, deprives the public of its right to
comment on and appeal timber sales.

For all its genuine
dangers, however, the Healthy Forests Act is something Westerners
need to embrace.

Already, under the act, local advisory
groups, fire-safe councils and watershed alliances are working with
the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to protect homes
from wildfire and restore forests. Communities that develop
fire-protection plans can receive funding to thin trees and clear
brush on both public and private lands. Tribal, state and local
governments can get funding and technical assistance for watershed
restoration and protection projects. There’s also money for
research on environmentally friendly forest practices, and for
jump-starting small businesses that use small-diameter trees and
other "biomass." There’s even a clause that allows the
government to create temporary "healthy forest reserves" to protect
endangered species on private lands.

Another law passed
in 2003 gives agencies authority to use multiyear "stewardship
contracts," which pay contractors based on the condition of the
forest left behind, rather than the logs they remove. These
long-term contracts give small operators some financial stability,
and can guarantee a supply of small trees and biomass to local
manufacturers and power plants. Any money the forests make from
selling the logs can be plowed back into local projects, rather
than sent to the federal treasury.

The alternative to
making these tools work — watching the forests languish and
houses burn while the agencies and environmentalists are stuck in
gridlock — is far worse.

"It’s up to the
folks who live next to those forests to keep them on the straight
and narrow," says George Sexton, conservation director of the
Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center in Ashland, Ore. If agencies go
back to cutting old-growth trees and logging roadless areas, he
says, groups like his will "sue their pants off." And if the
administration guts the laws and stacks the courts to make those
lawsuits futile, activists will take to the trees, as they have in
the last old-growth redwoods on private timberlands.

"There are few laws protecting (those trees on private lands), but
the timber companies have to fight old-growth tree by old-growth
tree," says Sexton. "If that’s what they want to do on the
national forests, that’s fine by me."

AGENCY OPENNESS

Support your local
bureaucrat

In contrast to corporations, public
agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land
Management are required to open their doors — and their
decisions — to the public. Over the past several years,
however, federal land-management agencies have become increasingly
secretive, to the point that they seem like branches of the timber
and energy industries.

It has become difficult for the
press, and the public at large, to talk with agency personnel.
Requests for interviews with agency employees — even leaders
such as Bureau of Land Management Director Kathleen Clarke and
Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth — are routinely bumped to
politically appointed higher-ups in the Interior and Agriculture
departments.

Citizens often have to force agencies to
share information by using the Freedom of Information Act, and even
that has its limits: More than three and a half years after
environmental groups filed a FOIA request, and then a lawsuit, to
obtain information about Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy
Task Force, they are still waiting.

National energy
policy isn’t the only thing being decided behind closed
doors. Outgoing Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman rescinded the
Roadless Area Conservation Rule despite overwhelming public comment
in support of it. The department has accepted a new round of
comment on a revised rule, but it makes no secret of the fact that
public comments are not votes, and will have less influence on the
new rule (HCN, 4/26/04: Outsourced).

The most alarming
phenomenon has been the stifling of scientists’ work. The
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has repeatedly ignored its own
scientists’ recommendations for recovery of the Rio Grande
silvery minnow in New Mexico. Similar suppression of
biologists’ research in NOAA Fisheries helped cause the death
of 58,000 salmon and steelhead in the Klamath Basin in 2002 (HCN,
6/23/03: Are minnow scientists still under the gun?) (HCN, 6/23/03:
Sound science goes sour).

A few dissenters have spoken
out. BLM archaeologist Blaine Miller, whose concerns about the
impacts of oil and gas exploration on archaeological sites led to
his removal from a project in Utah, continues to speak candidly to
the press (HCN, 7/19/04: BLM gags an archaeologist to get out the
gas). NOAA Fisheries biologist Michael Kelly blew the whistle on
his bosses when they doctored river-flow recommendations on the
Klamath; he has since resigned in the face of similar censorship on
another project.

But truly bridging the secrecy divide is
a challenge for people outside the government as well. Local
citizens and environmental groups need to become savvier watchdogs,
to learn the issues inside and out, and to be front and center at
every public meeting. They also need to have the sort of
over-the-backyard-fence conversations with agency staffers that
seem to have disappeared with the rise of the FOIA request. No
matter how badly science and public process have been manipulated,
continued and unrelenting public involvement will create a brand of
local solidarity that extends into the agencies, to the bureaucrats
under siege.

MAKING IT LOCAL

Time for a new Sagebrush Rebellion

If there were any doubts that the Bush
administration is out of touch with Westerners on environmental
issues, the November elections should have laid them to rest. In
race after race, Westerners stood up to industry and demanded
protection for their crisp, clear air, gurgling trout streams and
wide-open landscapes. Oddly, the administration insists that the
election gave it a mandate to continue to dismantle environmental
protections, clearing the way for its corporate backers to run
roughshod over the region.

To make the administration
understand the error of its ways, it will take a new Sagebrush
Rebellion.

In fact, a new rebellion has been brewing for
some time, and it has a distinctly different flavor than the
original, which was championed by President Ronald Reagan and
Interior Secretary James Watt, who set out to plunder the public
lands. The new rebels recognize that the days of strip-mining and
clear-cutting and overgrazing are past, and that the future rests,
first, on repairing damaged landscapes, and second, on building an
economy that doesn’t clean out the West’s larder in one
massive gulp.

New Mexico rancher Tweeti Blancett is one
of the rebellion’s many local leaders. A staunch Republican,
she turned against George W. Bush when his energy policies opened
her family’s ranch to natural gas drilling, destroying the
grass and the groundwater. She’s locked drillers off her
ranch, gone to Washington, D.C., to lobby her congressmen, and
pushed for change in the Republican Party. Most recently,
she’s taken to the courts as a plaintiff in two lawsuits, one
from the Sierra Club, and another from Karen Budd-Falen, a darling
of the original Sagebrush Rebellion.

This kind of work,
says Blancett, is "bringing people together from all across the
West that have different views." The rebellion is also raging in
rural Montana, where rancher-conservationists, organized as the
Rosebud Conservation Alliance, recently put tight restrictions on
coalbed methane drilling (HCN, 11/22/04: Election Day surprises in
the schizophrenic West). In New Mexico, environmentalists are
working to get a reformer elected to the board of the state Farm
Bureau. In Washington, some loggers are saying, "Thanks, but no,"
to the Bush administration’s offer of old-growth timber
sales, and instead putting their energy into restoring cut-over
forests (HCN, 9/27/04: Life After Old Growth).

The new
Sagebrush Rebels may be able to turn the far right’s agenda
to their own purposes. Bush administration appointees and
congressional Republicans claim they want to put the public lands
in the hands of the locals. If locals understand that finding a
lasting place in the region requires standing together against
industry efforts to plunder it, they may finally create a Sagebrush
Rebellion worthy of the West.

SOLIDARITY

Take it to the
streets

The environmental movement campaigned
against George W. Bush for three years and had no noticeable
influence on his re-election. That’s the clearest evidence
yet that the movement has stalled. There is widespread public
support for protecting environmental quality, but the national
groups have trouble tapping into it. For decades, they’ve
built their staffs and budgets, but as they’ve grown large,
they’ve become a bureaucracy — a movement of clerks
filing the paperwork of appeals and lawsuits and official comments,
insisting on procedure and technicalities.

The movement
needs to reinvigorate itself, to get more creative, and to reach
out to people who don’t necessarily consider themselves
environmentalists.

Some groups already help provide
farmers with windmills that generate clean energy as well as
profit. Some seek tax credits for automakers that make
cleaner-running vehicles, thereby also preserving union jobs.
Recently, hunters and anglers have been enlisted in the campaign to
save roadless forest habitat.

Environmental issues need
be framed around people, and the movement could do that in a big
way by marching on Washington, D.C. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr.
drew 250,000 people to the Washington Mall to rally for civil
rights. Today — when the Sierra Club alone has 700,000
members — the environmental movement should be able to rally
a million people to demonstrate the extent of public opposition to
anti-environmental policies.

A Green March would be proof
of the great variety of people who believe that environmental
protection is important. It could include the mothers of children
who suffer from asthma, which scientific studies link to air
pollution. It could include the residents of Libby, Mont., the
mining town where people are dying from the asbestos fibers in
their lungs. It could include government scientists whose research
is being squelched; American Indians and commercial fishermen who
want more done to save salmon runs; and anglers who can no longer
eat the fish they catch because of mercury contamination from power
plants. It could include caravans of ranchers who don't want their
land ruined by coalbed methane wells, and outfitters and even real
estate agents who rely on healthy rivers and scenic country to lure
their customers.

Westerners could link up with people
from West Virginia who want no more of their mountaintops lopped
off for coal mining, and people from Florida who want more done to
save the Everglades — and who want the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge to be saved from oil drilling.

A Green
March would strengthen the identity of the movement and widen its
outreach. Most importantly, it would flesh out the movement with a
million faces, and reveal the depth of popular concern about the
environment in a far more tangible way than a million e-mailed
public comment letters — or an exit poll — ever could.

To participate in an online forum about the future of the
West, and to meet other Westerners who are working locally to make
positive change, visit www.hcn.org/takeitforward.jsp .